Commodities

Things just aren’t as they seem, particularly in the markets. Joe Granville once said ‘if it’s obvious, it’s obviously wrong’. Short term and intermediate term price action always leads to narratives and baseless assumptions in the media that become obvious. They mostly just distract investors. Luckily, the financial blogosphere is filled with insightful folks who demystify a lot of the noise. Let’s get after it with this week’s “Top Trading

The corn market really never had a chance this week (Thursday’s 5 ¼-cent higher close notwithstanding). The downward spiraling price action was initially set in motion by last Friday’s Commitment of Traders report, which was released after the market closed on 7/24. In my opinion this report was the key contributing factor to the gap lower opening and close in December corn futures on Monday afternoon, which resulted in CZ5

The SPDR Gold Trust Shares ETF (GLD) has stabilized over the past week. This might not sound like much, but could be very important as prior to this calmness, GLD was in a mini-free fall. Whether this is just a pause in the downtrend or a market that is ready to put in at least a counter trend rally is difficult to answer. However, I am betting on a rally from here

Estimating the value of gold through history is an inherently challenging pursuit. Nevertheless, Chartered Financial Analyst, Stephen D. Simpson has attempted to glean some insight into how ancient societies valued gold. An 829 troy ounce Greek talent valued near $1.0 million today was valued at $13.5 million in ancient Greece when used to purchase labor presumed to be valued at $20 per hour. A worker in the 5th century earned

What a difference a week makes. The market ended the previous week on a strong note. And the S&P 500 seemed poised to follow the Nasdaq Composite and push to new all-time highs. But these and any other bullish hopes for the stock market were swiftly extinguished as the market put in an ugly reversal last week that resulted in a good deal of technical damage. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq

The following is a recap of The COT Report (Commitment Of Traders) released by the CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission) looking at futures positions of non-commercial holdings as of July 21, 2015. Note that the change is week-over-week. 10-Year Treasury Note: Is global growth slowing? The ongoing slump in commodities seems to suggest that. In this scenario, it would make sense for investors to be gobbling up Treasuries on the long

What is progress? Progress in education is when you look back and you see things differently. As George Bernard Shaw said “Progress is impossible without change and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything”. To be a better market operator, you’ve got to be willing to constantly re-shape (A) how you think and (B) your thoughts. Whether it’s about how the market is acting, how the world works

It’s been a crazy couple of weeks for Gold prices (and investors). As most are aware by now, the yellow metal has been out of favor for some time. And more recently, Gold’s slide has turned into a mini-panic. But after diving down into the 1070’s on Friday morning, Gold staged a rally back towards 1100 by the end of the day The recent action has several of my indicators at

Oil prices have reached lower than most traders expected, but the move probably isn’t over yet. Crude Oil prices could slip by another 20 percent or more from current values before it puts in a durable low. For context, we have been charting Oil futures as an A-B-C pattern down from the all-time high in 2008. The final leg of the pattern – the C wave – began as Oil prices

We’ve spent some time in the past discussing the very powerful technique of using ratio analysis to watch for rotation and inter market strength when comparing various assets classes or single instruments to others within their sector/market. We’ve also shown that patterns can and do work in ratio analysis. That being said, we are getting a bit one sided (to the bearish side) with regards to Crude Oil, precious metals, and select